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30% of Top Brands Are Investing in Customer Service on Twitter

A new study by Simply Measured finds that 30% of the Interbrand Top 100 Brands are investing in customer service on Twitter. While 99% of these top brands have Twitter accounts, only thirty have dedicated customer service handles to resolve issues as quickly as possible. By directing customer service inquiries to a dedicated Twitter handle (and away from their branding platform), this strategy helps to “protect brand identity.”

However, the presence of a dedicated account does not assure a response: the average response rate to all customer service mentions was 42%. The best response rate (out of the 30 brands) was 75%, and there were only 5 brands with response rates higher than 60%.

In short, the study reveals that even out of those brands that do have dedicated Twitter handles for customer service, there’s still a long way to go, both in terms of response rate and response time: the average response time for customer support was 5.1 hours — a long time on Twitter. Only 10% of the 30 brands achieved an average response time of under one hour – and none of the brands were able to maintain a response time under 30 minutes.

However, brands’ average response time is often bogged down by a few replies (to ‘missed’ inquiries) that happened days after the initial mention. Overall, 61% of customer service responses were sent within an hour of the initial customer support inquiry – a figure that actually exceeds customer expectations, based on study data.

Here’s a breakdown – by engagement – of the top 10 brands using dedicated customer service handles on Twitter:

The report is Simply Measured’s second quarterly customer service study, and offers comparison to similar data from December 2012.